Diversity at Berkeley: Demagoguery or Demography?

The case for Cal’s admissions policy, designed to mirror the state’s population.

The director of a large California foundation once told me that his work had become easier now that his board members understood cultural diversity "as a demographic fact and not a liberal plot." His optimism was premature. In the past year a full-blown conservative reaction, exemplified by Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, has depicted the new claims of ethnic pluralism precisely as a liberal or radical plot. In its most mechanical form, the conservative argument pictures elite colleges as admitting unqualified students through affirmative action. These students, once there, lower standards, frustrate faculty, and develop an ideology of cultural separatism to justify their own incompetence. The demand for more representative or non-traditional curricula is one more, mostly illegitimate, offshoot of their presence on campus. Affirmative action is thus the source of a new and sinister ideology called "multiculturalism," which undermines not only higher education but also the very cohesion of America.

The tragedy of this attack is that it treats complex demographic shifts as if they were merely manufactured by ideologues. In California, New York, Texas, and elsewhere, good-faith efforts by college administrators to accommodate these shifts, often with quite dissimilar strategies, now carry a similar political burden. The further tragedy is that this attack has polarized discussion of such profoundly important and subtle questions as who shall be educated, what is worthy of study, how to conceive of "merit," and how best to reconcile diversity, achievement, democracy, and nationhood.

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The University of California at Berkeley is now the site of one the most diverse student bodies in the country. Berkeley may not be entirely representative of other elite universities, but it is a place where both administrators of the nine-campus University of California system and those on the Berkeley campus have taken an activist approach to managing these demographic changes.

In California, the changes are truly profound: The current (1990) configuration of nearly 30 million people is: white (69 percent); Asian (9.6 percent); Hispanic origin (25.8 percent), black (7.4 percent); American Indian (.8 percent), and other (13.2 percent). By the year 2010, no one ethnic or racial group will constitute a numerical majority. This marked shift in the composition of California's population, driven by both immigration and differential birth rates, is captured in the often used phrase that California will be the first "majority/minority state."

In 1988, for the first time, entering freshmen at Berkeley reflected the California of the future: white students were a minority (48.5 percent) of the total. The other admissions were black (7 percent); Chica-no/Latino (11.1 percent); Asian (26.5 percent); American Indian (1.1 percent); and others (5.8 percent). The 1991 class reflects a further diminution of Caucasian students, now 30 percent, a slight increase in Asian students (35 percent), and a near doubling of Hispanics (20 percent).

Admissions and EligibilityCalifornia, with the nation's most ambitious system of public higher education, offers a three-tier system -- the elite University of California with nine campuses including UCLA and Berkeley, nineteen other state universities such as San Jose State, and one hundred-six community colleges. In principle the three tiers guarantee universal access to higher education for California residents; in practice, the resources flowing to the three tiers are dramatically unequal.

Since 1964, admission to the University of California has been structured by a legislatively adopted Master Plan. Entering students must be in the top one-eighth of their graduating class. That requirement translates into a 3.25 grade point average (B plus) for students in California's 1200 high schools. In the actual admissions process, students must also have taken a series of specific high school courses, and done well on their SAT's. These measures are combined in an "academic index," and used at all U.C. campuses. The overwhelming majority of racial and ethnic minority admissions at Berkeley are drawn from this top one-eighth eligibility pool, yet a common misperception is that most minority students do not meet the published criteria.

One charge is that many minority students, African Americans in particular, may technically qualify because they receive good grades from mediocre high schools. But whatever the case in other states, minority applicants who qualify for the University of California are not drawn primarily from racially isolated inner city schools; many, if not most, are drawn from high schools that are already extraordinarily diverse. Furthermore, the State of California's Post-Secondary Education Commission continually audits the University's admissions procedures and the comparability of high school coursework, to ensure compliance with denned criteria.

Unfortunately, other demographic facts -- notably the rapidly rising number of high school graduates in California -- have magnified the most minute differences between who gets accepted and who does not. Until the late 1960s, the University of California at Berkeley was able to accept virtually every applicant who met the eligibility criteria. Now the pressure is so great that Berkeley accepts approximately 16 percent of the formally eligible students in the pool. In 1989 for instance, there were 3,500 entry slots available. More than 5,800 of the 21,300 students who applied had straight A averages. As the Berkeley Faculty Senate's Karabel Report on admissions criteria concluded: "Regardless of affirmative action, regardless of any kind of action, Berkeley did not have room for at least 2,300 straight A students." In 1991, the number of students with straight A averages was 8,400.

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This crunch is destined to get worse. By the year 2004, the number of high school students will nearly double to approximately 400,000 students, from 250,000 in 1990, making the competition for slots and the admissions decisions even more excruciating. The demographic composition of high school graduates is changing as well. Caucasian graduates are declining both absolutely (52 percent of all high school graduates, down from 61.8 percent in 1986), and in the numbers who apply to the university. Asian-American students, by contrast, are increasing in both categories. Asian applicants have jumped 44 percent in the last five years.

To date, the university system has been able to accommodate all eligible students, but not their choice of campus. For example, a rejected Berkeley applicant could still attend UCLA. But that accommodation cannot continue without growth of the system. Faced with these enrollment projections, the university is scrambling to add a tenth campus to its system, despite shrinking state budgets. And enrollment projections indicate three additional campuses, not one, will be required if the current policy of admitting the top 12.5 percent is to continue. It should be clear from the simple mathematics that there has to be some other basis, besides ranking grade point averages, to determine who is admitted.

At the Berkeley campus, the "state's policy of admitting students to reflect the broad diversity of cultural, racial, geographic, and socio-economic backgrounds characteristic of California" works like this. Berkeley allocates roughly half of the slots (the number varies -- it was 56 percent in 1991) to applicants strictly in accordance with their academic eligibility score, a combination of their grade point average and SAT score. All but approximately 5 percent of the remaining admissions (44 percent) are chosen from within the same eligibility pool, but additional criteria, including but not limited to race and ethnicity, may be considered. The remaining 5 percent of students are selected through a "special admit" category, which provides a path for those with special circumstances or characteristics, including athletes, older re-entry students, and the socio-economically dis-advantaged. These students are selected on a individual case-by-case basis. In 1990, only 18 percent of entering black freshmen were from the special admit category.

Leaving aside the special admit category, since it is so small, how might the eligibility requirements translate for two students? If two hypothetical students, one black and one white, have, say, 3.6 grade point averages and SAT scores of 1100, the black student would have a better chance of admission to the Berkeley campus. Thus, it is here, at the margins of eligibility, that the conflict over admissions policy really occurs. If the two students meet the eligibility threshhold, the student with slightly lower formal academic attainment may be the one selected, on the basis of race -- or geography, extra-curricular talent, leadership, or the admission committee's detection of yet unrealized academic potential. The attempt to attain a diverse student body is of course deeply embedded in the system of college admissions; indeed, the only relatively recent addition to that concept is racial or ethnic diversity.

This is a real conflict, and one that reflects divergent philosophical values about whether it is ever legitimate to take race, per se, into account in an individual admissions decision. It is a far different conflict, however, from the image of barely literate minorities usurping the slots of more deserving white students. Indeed, the 1990 report of Berkeley's Diversity Project points out that "in sheer numbers, there are actually more white students than blacks admitted to Berkeley's freshman class with grade point averages below 3.6. "

Nonetheless, those whites who are turned away -- today from Berkeley, but potentially from the entire University system -- provide plenty of frustration for demagogues to exploit. Yet fashioning an equitable alternative is not so easy. In a sense, the university's Board of Regents has already been through its "Willie Horton" fight. This largely Republican-appointed group, concerned about just such fears of reverse discrimination, is said to have listened in stunned silence as University President David Gardner laid out these demographic facts and enrollment statistics. Gardner, who cannot credibly be described as a "liberal social engineer" (he is a conservative Mormon from Utah, a nationally prominent Republican, and a cautious administrator), restated the University's policy of admitting qualified students to reflect the state's diversity, a policy mandated by the legislature since the adoption of the Master Plan in 1960. Gardner then invited alternatives. None were presented at the meeting.

The Faculty Senate committee at Berkeley, which reviewed admission procedures in 1990 and recommended in its Karabel Report only minor modifications despite considerable rancor during the committee's deliberations, ran a computer tape to see who would be admitted if all students were selected strictly on a mathematical basis. The result was that Berkeley would admit the top 3 to 4 percent of California's high school students, and its student body would be mostly white and Asian in composition. Such a selection process would also overturn state policy.

Pluralism and MeritWhat must one believe to adopt an admissions policy based on numbers alone? One must believe that what tests measure as intelligence is valid and reliable, that grades are objective measures, that both tests and grades predict academic success in college, and that in some past golden age, universities admitted in accordance with some objective standard of intellectual merit. When Associate Vice Chancellor Russ Ellis says such a policy "is never" going to be adopted by the University of California, he has history, not just state policy, on his side. Traditionally, colleges or universities have almost never admitted students based strictly on grades and test results. In fact, university system-wide officials could think of only one college in the country -- Georgia Tech -- that admits students according to academic scores alone. Historically, university student bodies have been chosen with an eye on their composition as a whole, and have included such considerations as whether or not the students were in-state or out-of-state, from rural or urban areas, whether their educational achievements were balanced by extracurricular activities, and so forth. In other words, "merit" has always been both somewhat subjective and flexible. The contested nature of merit, always implicit, is much more apparent in a demographically diverse situation, when a returning housewife competes against a student who is the first in a poor family to attend college and a student from a fourth-generation college-educated family.

It is not clear whether the most vociferous critics of affirmative action admissions policies mean to argue for standards of statistical precision that have not existed previously. One is left with the impression, however, that this is where the logic leads, for few critics of existing policies have articulated any educational policy alternatives or attendant admissions criteria.

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It is possible, of course, to suggest that every sort of non-traditional criterion but race is allowable, in order to achieve a diverse student body without explicitly considering race in individual admissions decisions. This sort of indirect diversity strategy may yet become necessary to pass muster with an increasingly conservative Supreme Court. However, for nearly thirty years the courts have accepted the idea that in a society with a history of racial discrimination race may, and even should, be taken into account in fashioning remedies. That view, which has informed enforcement of voting rights, public school integration, fair housing, as well as affirmative action in employment and college admissions, is now coming under assault from the Rehnquist Court.

University officials have argued, convincingly, that the achievement of greater diversity at Berkeley has not come at the cost of quality and have produced many reports to back up their claims. One Berkeley campus report asserts that the 1988 class was simultaneously the most diverse, and "the strongest academically, in Berkeley's history (as measured by high school grades and scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test)." Administrators also argue that by every measure minorities admitted to Berkeley do better than the middle-class white students of the 1950s and 1960s. Average SAT scores at Berkeley, a measure not free of controversy but a more consistent measurement over time than grade point averages, have risen.

Retention and Graduation RatesCritics argue that the academic weakness of minority students is demonstrated by their failure to graduate at the same rate as white students. Five-year graduation rates for blacks who entered UC/Berkeley in 1984 were 39 percent, compared with an available national data for whites (46 percent) and for whites at Berkeley (73 percent). For Chicanos and Latinos, the Berkeley rate was 52 percent, above the 46 percent white rate nationally. The most recent report of the University system-wide, issued in March 1991, compared the five-year graduation rates for African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics and concluded in all cases they "exceed, and in some instances nearly double, those of comparable public institutions." Figures for minorities who graduate within six years are even better. These numbers are themselves inconclusive, for case studies suggest that many minority students drop out for economic reasons, as "front-loaded" scholarship aid tends to dwindle in the student's junior and senior year.

For both Berkeley and the university system as a whole, the data show minorities are graduating in increasing rates, and these rates exceed those of earlier, more homogeneous, classes. This is not to say that anyone should be satisfied with lower minority retention rates. It is to say that, placed in historical context, these figures remind us that change occurs over time and in many directions. These same figures might be viewed as a considerable accomplishment.

However, the politicization of retention rates and the casual use of statistics has had some terrible consequences, according to Patrick Hayashi, associate vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment. "People are being told they don't measure up and some of them are coming to believe it." He described attending a Filipino cultural event on campus for which hundreds of Filipinos from all over the Bay area turned out. "It was a marvelous evening ... [then] during intermission, a Filipino student spoke to the audience about how poorly Filipinos were during on campus with a retention rate of only 55 percent." The student "created a picture of a barely achieving, barely literate group of people that were just not making it at all." Yet, "if you went to any other university in this state, these rates would have been fantastic."

"What do we make of the fact that the retention rate for Chicanos now is the same as that for whites in 1958," Hayashi asks rhetorically? "I don't know....but one thing it suggests to me is that you don't simply abandon the effort to admit Chicanos." As Hayashi and his assistant note, EySouza made an "egregious error" when he used minority retention rates drawn only from those admitted from the 5 percent special-admit category, a classification explicitly designed as high risk.

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The use of broad racial and ethnic categories disguises the reality of the newly constituted student body. At Berkeley, there is diversity within diversity within diversity. For instance, the Asian-American category is far from homogeneous, with significant differences among students of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Cambodian, or East Indian ancestry, to give just a few examples. Asian students, like Chicanos or Latinos, might be recent immigrants or third- and fourth-generation Americans. Similarly, the Hispanic category (a term fallen into disrepute for reasons largely internal to its own diversity) incorporates many countries of origin -- from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean to South American countries.

Diversity isn't a code word for a pernicious new ideology: it is an inadequate word to describe the reality of different cultures now living together in one state, and in this case, on one campus. Vice President for Academic Affairs William Frazer argues that the attainment of such diversity without sacrificing quality, "is an extraordinary achievement -- and one few understand."

Dealing with DiversityCampus administrators have taken a number of actions to help them understand the conflicts that have come with so much cultural and racial difference. For nearly three years, the everyday experiences of students in this new multicultural environment have been explored in a path-breaking study known as the Diversity Project. In one year alone, a team comprised of faculty and researchers, themselves ethnically diverse, have conducted interviews with approximately 230 students, divided into fifty-five focus groups.

In the first phase, groups of "homogeneous" students were constructed and matched with researchers of the same race/ethnicity In stage two, students were mixed together. Far from being unable to discuss sensitive issues, such as affirmative action and "cliques," the candor of the mixed groups exceeded the expectation of the researchers.

Two overarching conclusions provide a key to the climate on campus: First, despite enormous reservoirs of good will toward diversity in the abstract, students were ambivalent and conflicted about it in the particular. There are "deep and gnawing reservations among the supporters [of affirmative action], and some strong sympathy even among the detractors." And second, all groups -- whether they supported or opposed affirmative action -- lacked specific knowledge about it, so that "strongly held opinions [exist] alongside either misinformation or complete ignorance..."

According to the focus groups, the belief that minority students do not meet eligibility criteria appears to be behind the tendency of some white students to see affirmative action in images of ownership and theft: 'The operating assumption among many of the white and Asian students that we interviewed is that Black, Chicano/ Latino, and Native American students don't 'belong' at Cal."

If those views are common among whites, among minorities there is awareness that practices of granting preferences to sons or daughters of alumni never engendered similar antagonism. The Diversity Project report concludes, 'In American higher education, far more whites have entered the gates of the ten most elite institutions through 'alumni preference' than all the Blacks and Chicanos together have ever entered through Affirmative Action." The fact that minorities are highly conscious of these practices means that "rage simmers on both sides of the great divide."

These underlying perceptions of the admissions process give rise to subsidiary tensions over friendships and group associations, labeled "balkanization" by critics. Racial and ethnic minorities are said to form enclaves that exclude and/or reject more integrationist modes of relating. The Diversity report describes the arrival of students on campus as an encounter with a large, anonymous urban environment. Students have long found a niche through the so-called affinity groups which help orient the newcomers. "In the 1950s and 1960s," observes sociologist and report author Troy Duster, "organizations like Newman and Hillel helped provided a supportive context for Catholic and Jewish students. What's new, because now it is based upon racial and ethnic differences, is that it looks to a lot of whites like they are being excluded."

Duster sees these tensions as part of a period of transition, a stage in the development of race relations. What appears to critics as tribalism may in fact be a way to help individuals establish an identity from which they can affirm a sense of self and participate in new public arenas. Duster says we lack a good way to theorize about cultural competence in the context of today's race relations, where "relational skills are increasingly required to navigate among diverse cultures," but if "you believe in the imagery of the melting pot, a powerful nostalgia can be created."

According to Professor David Wellman, a sociologist and colleague of Duster on the Diversity Project, in the past minority groups have been required to understand and become literate in the mores of the dominant culture. Today, he argues, all groups need to develop competence. Seen from this perspective, white students from suburbs or private schools in which cultural differences are minimal may be the most disadvantaged, the least culturally literate. Students from heterogeneous high schools, including ethnic minorities, are already "used to moving between cultural worlds."

Wellman cites the work of math professor Uri Treisman as an example of cultural learning. In the mid-1970s, Treisman set out to discover why Asian students did so much better in calculus than black and Hispanic students. He watched them closely, in and out of the classroom, for 18 months and discovered that the Chinese students studied together, making homework almost a social event. "Gathered around a pot of soup, the students would compare answers, review old exams, and work as a team to solve especially difficult homework problems." Black and Hispanic students, by contrast, studied by themselves and sharply separated their academic from their social lives. Drawing on this knowledge, Treisman set up workshops where blacks and Hispanics could study in groups. The results were dramatic -- the failure rate dropped from 60 to 4 percent. Treisman now uses this approach for all students and the technique has been replicated at other universities. Wellman sees this as an example of cultural learning with dramatic effects. Exploring such ground, however, requires not just curiosity but a freedom from racial and ethnic stereotypes.

When the context is changed, and the subject matter is slightly less charged, "cultural competence" is widely seen as sensible and uncontroversial. For instance, many in the business community have worked for years to convey the necessity of understanding Japanese culture and practice when doing business with Japan. Wellman and Duster argue that American society in the future, especially the workforce, will be comprised of enormous cultural diversity and that understanding difference is functional.

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In addition to studies, reports, and surveys, the Berkeley campus has created a multicultural action team for situations or requests that need a quick response, established new student orientation programs, and even created a multicultural "game" called DARE that entering students can play to learn about other cultural sensitivities in a "safe" environment. According to Sheila Bradley, a Berkeley senior, "You can just tell who has gone to a school where many cultures are represented -- they're just more comfortable." Ironically, a minority student from a predominantly white high school where they felt comfortable and accepted can have a particularly jolting experience as a newcomer to campus, where she may have her first encounter with racial stereotypes and discrimination. Another undergraduate from a conservative, mostly white, suburban community said her first semester at Berkeley was a "cultural shock" as she had no idea what it meant to be viewed as a Mexican, and "even the word Chicano was new to her."

A survey of undergraduate attitudes at Berkeley, published as the Maslach Report, suggests that students are increasingly aware of the campus as a microcosm of the world they expect to find after graduation, and indicate a desire (70 percent) to have more cross-cultural contact. White students say they desire this contact less than other groups, but even a majority of non-white groups express such wishes. Three-fourths (75 percent) of the students said their experience at Berkeley made them more comfortable with people of different backgrounds.

While these reported attitudes may be influenced by what students believe they are expected to say, students in the focus groups repeatedly urged administrators to find more situations where cross-cultural interaction could occur. These students sharply distinguished between naturally occurring activities, such as sports or music (band, orchestra, or choirs), and those designed specifically to acquaint them with other cultures, such as campus-wide dances. But decisions about whose music to play and beliefs about who can -- and cannot -- really dance make these events more, not less, fraught with tension. Both the Mas-lach Report and the Diversity Project urge faculty to take a more active role in task-oriented group activities, especially those that can be organized around the classroom and coursework.

Associate Vice Chancellor Ellis emphasizes how few racial and ethnic incidents have occurred among the campus's 30,000 students, given the scope and magnitude of the change. Many of the ones that do occur, he says, originate in the dormitories and "are reallyclumsy attempts at intimacy." Ellis argues that the university has only begun to understand how much restructuring is needed to accommodate this new student body, since "most services were predicated on a relatively homo-genious student body that no longer exists." However, new services are improbable, given the state's fiscal crunch.

The faculty, roughly 84 percent white and male, is also feeling new demands of cultural competence as it deals with a student body whose ethnic make-up has changed dramatically in a short time. White male students are now just 16 percent of the total, and this must be jarring to at least some faculty members, simply by virtue of the departure from the composition of past classrooms.

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Multiculturalism, or the required study of non-traditional curricula, has been singled out for ridicule in the work of rJSouza and others. Obviously, the study of diverse cultures can be undertaken as a political gesture -- or a serious enterprise. At Berkeley, in 1989, a controversial "American cultures breadth requirement" was adopted by the Berkeley faculty. All students were required to take one course whose content would draw on at least three cultural groups (African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latinos, and European Americans). To qualify for inclusion in the new requirement, a course had to be "integrative and comparative and address theoretical and analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American history and society." Many courses, from many disciplines, can be certified over time. The administration established a Center for the Teaching and Study of American Cultures, with special summer institute funds to subsidize faculty who wished to design or revise courses to qualify for credit as meeting the new American cultures requirement.

Some members of the faculty objected to the whole concept. Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, for one, opposed the approach; however Wildavsky, calling himself "a good and loyal citizen" is gamely revising one of his own courses so that it qualifies for inclusion. Few of the traditionalists on the faculty exhibit this good will, leaving the new curriculum to those already sympathetic to it.

Even if the current policies at Berkeley can be defended pedagogically and constitutionally, some critics argue that they are vulnerable politically; that the university is in danger of losing critical support from voters, who are disproportionately white and well off. They believe the university has made a calculated political choice, and that it is the wrong one. Some believe grades and SAT scores should be strictly applied in order to avoid admitting a 3.5 minority student over a 4.0 student (presumed to be white but just as likely Asian). Some are sympathetic to the idea that a public, tax-supported university should enroll a diverse cross-section of the state's students, but suggest students with 3.5 grade point averages (presumed to be minorities but just as likely to be white) enroll in the second-tier state university system.

Unwittingly perhaps, these critics raise a powerful issue: over time, the three tiers of California's higher education system are not just "different," they are rank-ordered in terms of resources and quality. The difference between a 4.0 and a 3.5 high school grade point average may be miniscule in terms of their academic potential or their future contributions to society, but, given the resource disparity, these differences will be magnified, not minimized, by where in the higher education system the student lands.

If, then, the university continues its policies, what must be done? The Diversity Project emphsizes again and again the depth of misunderstanding of basic facts and recommends that all entering students be given information on admissions policies and statistics on class composition. But fact sheets won't of course alter most forms of prejudice, or the outrage of a student denied her preference of campus. One skeptical campus administrator's response to the figures contained in this article, especially the fact that most minorities were in the eligibility pool, was unfortunately typical. He said, "I simply don't believe it." The Diversity Report urges greater clarity and explicimess about the philosophical rationale that underlies admissions policies. "Redress of past grievances through affirmative action remain part of the rationale, but not all of it," says Duster.

The language of affirmative action was applied by administrators to both the 5 percent special admit category and the second category of admissions (46 percent in 1991). Approximately 80 percent of the admissions in the 46 percent category -- where attributes other than grades and SAT scores are permitted -- are in the college of letters and science. According to Hayashi, approximately 30 percent of those are white students. He occasionally startles one of these students by pointing out that they, in a sense, are affirmative action admissions.

However, it is no longer clear, given the complex diversity of ethnicity and social class, precisely what affirmative action means at a campus like Berkeley. Does it really make sense to say that these white students, admitted partly based on criteria other than grades and test scores, are "affirmative action" enrollments? In effect, three different ideas are being confused: policies designed to accommodate diversity in the population and create a broadly diverse student body in the aggregate; policies that use non-traditional criteria to identify merit and talent, quite apart from race; and policies of racial or ethnic targeting explicitly intended to compensate for past discrimination, exclusion, or under-representation.

If, as some critics contend, the Supreme Court may strike down admissions policies which include consideration of race or ethnicity, are traditional modes of selecting study bodies that rely on non-"objective" criteria also to be thrown out? Does it make sense to balance a class with athletes, alumni offspring, or a rural-urban mix of students, but not take into account racial and ethnic composition? If critics of current policies believe that a diverse student body is a legitimate objective, how would they structure admissions criteria so they are not led into the absurdity of allowing every balancing criterion but race or ethnicity? And if white admissions continue to stay below their proportion of the overall population or of high school graduates, will whites then become an "under-represented" group eligible for "affirmative action"?

As the Diversity Report suggests, there seems to be a movement in the direction of justifying a diverse student body for civic and social reasons, rather than simply as a compensatory response to past discrimination. The well-educated elite needs to be broadly representative; a multicultural society -- epitomized by California -- needs leaders from a variety of backgrounds. At some point in the future, the present effects of past racial isolation and discrimination will be ancient history; and one must hope that talent, which we believe to be distributed in the population without regard to race, will someday be so obvious that "objective" admissions criteria will be easy to agree upon. But until that day comes, the education of a broad and democratic society will require a heroic, complex, and sometimes controversial commitment to diversity in college enrollments.

About the Author

Karen M. Paget, a frequent foundation consultant, is currently a Soros Open Society Institute fellow. She has consulted on state and local fiscal issues for the Ford Foundation and the Twentieth Century Fund. She is the author of "The Battle for the States," in The New Majority.